Sim Smith is delighted to present Wenhui Hao's first solo exhibition in London, Forgiveness is a prolonged death. Bringing together a new body of large-scale paintings, including the artist's largest work to date, the exhibition explores the complexities of women's lived experience through an immersive painterly language in which body, landscape and memory become inseparable. Moving between beauty and violence, intimacy and transformation, Wenhui's paintings create psychologically charged spaces where desire, vulnerability and resilience coexist.
Please join us for a special celebration of the exhibition on Tuesday, 1st September 2026, from 6.30pm to 8.30pm at 6 Camberwell Passage, London SE5 0AX. Free, all welcome, RSVP essential at info@sim-smith.com.
Rejecting idealised representations of the female body, Wenhui embraces ambiguity and contradiction, exploring trauma alongside longing, sensuality and renewal. Working with dense layers of oil paint, she builds richly textured surfaces where gesture, colour and material become inseparable from meaning. Saturated passages of crimson, magenta, violet and flesh tones bleed, blossom and decay across the canvas, collapsing distinctions between body and landscape, interior and exterior.
Flowers, fruit, food and fragments of the human figure appear only if you can decipher their edges under heavily abstracted gestures. Split-open blossoms, ruptured fruit and fragmented anatomy recur as potent metaphors throughout the exhibition, evoking trauma, desire, loss and regeneration, while hidden landscapes of forests, caves and glacial waterfalls become psychological terrains in which the body continually dissolves and reforms. Food occupies a particularly charged role: torn open, cut and transformed, it speaks to primal urges, suppressed desire and the violence inherent in acts of consumption, becoming a metaphor for both emotional and bodily experience.
Underlying this body of work is the artist's experience of abortion, which becomes a point of departure for a wider exploration of bodily autonomy, experience, grief and transformation. Rather than recounting autobiography, Wenhui uses painting to consider the emotional complexity of women's lives and the ways deeply personal experience can resonate collectively.
The exhibition places Wenhui within a lineage of artists who have insisted upon women's lived experience as a vital subject for painting. Her work enters into dialogue with Juanita McNeely, whose monumental Is It Real? Yes, It Is! (1969) broke new ground by confronting abortion with startling candour, and Paula Rego, whose celebrated Abortion series (1998–99) transformed a deeply politicised subject into one of profound psychological complexity and human dignity. Like McNeely and Rego before her, Wenhui refuses euphemism or spectacle, instead addressing reproductive experience through an intensely physical painterly language that foregrounds vulnerability, resilience and embodied memory.
With Forgiveness is a prolonged death, Wenhui contributes a distinctive voice to contemporary painting, extending this important lineage while affirming painting's enduring ability to articulate experiences that have long remained absent from—or marginalised within—the history of art.